[eastbound]

The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years.

Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.

[brugidou]

They did that already see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt or Numergy.

[nickv]

And Minitel, they had networked computers in people's homes in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel.

[yubblegum]

And packet switching and arguably a far more capable architecture for internetworking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES